"Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any
human suffering."

-Epicurus

"They specialized in an activity that one could call in modern language
pastoral care, life counseling or psychotherapy"

-Hans-Josef Kauck

"Philosophy is really homesickness."

Novalis (1772-1801)

"I have always been impressed by the fact that the most studiously
avoided subject in Western Philosophy is that of happiness."

Lin Yutang

"The first business of a philosopher is, to part with
self-conceit."

Epictetus

"The philosophical problem is an awareness of disorder in our concepts,
and can be solved by ordering them."

-Ludwig Wittgenstein

"True philosophers are always occupied in the practice of dying."

Plato

"Higher thought originates as meditation upon death. Every religion,
every scientific investigation, every philosophy, proceeds from it. Every great
symbolism attaches its form-language to the cult of the dead, the forms of
disposal of the dead, the adornment of the graves of the dead."

-Oswald Spengler

"There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest
philosophy."

Nietzsche

"The true Philosopher is the man who loves to look with admiration at
the truth. The truth of things, however, is that which they are in
themselves."

Eric Voegelin

"Alexander wishes health to Aristotle: You have not done well in
publishing abroad these sciences which should only be taught by word of mouth,
otherwise how shall we be distinguished from other men if the knowledge we have acquired
is made the common property of all?"

Alexander the Great

"As for Diseases of the Mind, against them Philosophy is provided of
Remedies; being, in that respect, justly accounted the Medicine of the
Mind."

-Epicurus

"To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to
found a school.....It is to solve some of the problems of life, not
theoretically, but practically."

-Henry David Thoreau

"There was once a time when, by devoting myself to philosophy and to
contemplation of the world and its parts, I achieved the enjoyment of that Mind
which was truly beautiful, desirable, and blessed; for I lived in constant
communion with sacred utterances and teachings, in which I greedily and
insatiably rejoiced. No base or worldly thoughts occurred to me, nor did I
grovel for glory, wealth, or bodily comfort, but seemed ever to be borne aloft
into the heights with a rapture of soul, and to accompany sun, moon, heaven and
universe in their revolutions."

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by
means of language."

Wittgenstein

"To be a Philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts ....But to
so love wisdom as to live accordingly to its dictates. A life of simplicity,
independence, magnanimity, and trust."

Thoreau

"The criers of philosophy call all men to a comradeship of the spirit.
To a fraternity of thought. To a convocation of Selves. Philosophy invites men
out of the vanity of selfishness; out of the sorrow of ignorance and the despair
of worldliness; out of the Travesty of Ambition and the cruel clutches of greed;
out of the red hell of hate and the cold tomb of dead idealism."

Manly P. Hall

"Kant's teaching produces a fundamental change in every mind that has
grasped it. This change is so great that it may be regarded as an intellectual
rebirth. It alone is capable of removing the inborn realism that arises from the
original disposition of the intellect.....In consequence of this, the mind
undergoes a fundamental undeceiving, and thereafter looks at everything in a
different light. But only in this way does a man become susceptible to the more
positive explanations I have to give."

-Arthur Schopenhauer

The World as Will and Representation

"The only people really at leisure are those who take time
for philosophy. They alone really live. It is not their lifetime alone of which
they are careful stewards: they annex every age to their own and exploit all the
years that have gone before. By the exertions of others we are led to the
fairest treasures, raised to the light out of the darkness in which they were
mined. No age is forbidden us, we have admittance to all, and if we choose to
transcend the narrow bounds of human frailty by loftiness of mind, there is a
vast stretch of time for us to roam. We may dispute with Socrates, doubt with
Carneades, repose with Epicurus, transcend human nature with the Stoics, defy it
with the Cynics.."

Seneca (4 B.C. -A.D. 65)

..."This is the sole means of prolonging your mortality, rather of
transforming it into immortality. Honors, monuments, all that ambition has
blazoned in inscriptions or piled high in some tomb will speedily sink to ruin; there
is nothing that the lapse of times does not dilapidate and exterminate. But the
dedications of philosophy rare impregnable; age cannot erase their memory or
diminish their force. Each succeeding generation will hold them in ever higher
reverence; what is close at hand is subject to envy, whereas the distant we can
admire without prejudice. The philosopher's life is therefore spacious; he is
not hemmed in and constricted like others. He alone is exempt from the
limitations of humanity; all ages are at his service as at a god's. Has time gone
by? He holds it fast in recollections. Is time now present? He utilizes it. Is
it still to come? He anticipates it. The amalgamation of all time into makes his
life long."

Seneaca

"He who desires to philosophize must first of all doubt all things. He
must not assume a position in a debate before he has listened to the various
opinions, and considered and compared the reasons for and against. He must never
judge or take up a position on the evidence of what he has heard, on the opinion
of the majority, the age, merits, or prestige of the speaker concerned, but he
must proceed according to the persuasion of an organic doctrine which adheres to
real things, and to a truth that can be understood by the light of reason."

-Giordano Bruno

"There are good reasons why all philosophical dogmatizing, however
solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more
than a noble childishness and tyrannism. And perhaps the time is at hand when it
will be comprehended again and again how little used to be sufficient to
furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers'
edifices as the dogmatists have built so far: any old superstition from time
immemorial (like the old soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and
ego superstition, has not yet ceased to do mischief); some play on words
perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow,
very personal, very human, all too human facts."

Nietzsche

Beyond Good and Evil

"The peculiar, withdrawn attitude of the philosopher, world-denying,
hostile to life, suspicious of the senses, freed from sensuality, which has been
maintained down to the most modern times and has become virtually the philosopher's
pose par excellence-it is above all a result of the emergency conditions
under which philosophy would not have been possible at all on earth
without ascetic wraps and cloak, without an ascetic self-misunderstanding. To
put it vividly: the ascetic priest provided until the most modern times
the repulsive and gloomy caterpillar form in which the philosopher could live
and creep about."

Nietzsche

"Philosophy-a witch's pudding brew, a big black battered cauldron full
of a heterogeneous stew, odd bits and scrapments tossed in by various
philosophical cooks, all heated from below by the fire of controversy. From the
purling bubbling mess ascends a steam, a heavy vaporous cloud, obscuring
somewhat the bearded cooks squatting around the huge pot. Every now and then
some old man throws another chunk of fatty meat into the mixture, and though
occasionally some indomitable dogmatist jumps up, tries to kick the fire apart,
declaring the stew finished, the truth is that the stew is far from
finished and probably never will be."

-Edward Abbey

"The only good thing which we owe to Plato and Aristotle is that they
brought forward many arguments which we can use against the heretics. yet they
and other philosophers are now in Hell."

-Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498)

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www.noesis.evansville.edu (this is a way that scholars can freely give
their ideas to the global community.)

Book: Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Book: "The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their
Thought" by Ben-Ami Scharstein